For Mother's Day ...

Betty Lou's alter ego used to write a newspaper column. The following appeared in a newspaper last May and best expresses my feelings about my own mother and the day that honors everyones' Mother. (The much-loved painting above is called "La Toilette" or "The Bath"and was painted by Mary Cassatt c.1891.)

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day has just passed and, for me, it always comes and goes with a small dose of melancholy. I’ve been a mother for nine and a half years and in that respect Mother’s Day is a blast. But I’ve been without my own mother for almost thirty years.

Her name was Charlotte and she succumbed to breast cancer when she was 49 years old. She was 44 when she discovered a lump in her breast in late fall. Her doctor told her they could wait until after the holidays to do anything so as not to disrupt her life. There was no sense of urgency about her condition and it wasn’t until March that she went in to have the lump removed. When she awoke from surgery she was without her breast, her uterus and a portion of her lymph nodes. It was a rude awakening at the very least.

My teenaged years were often sad and lonely because of my mother’s cancer. Not only was she facing the biggest challenge of her life; my father sunk into a deep depression over his inability to help her get better. There were still happy times to be sure but those years were mostly defined by fear and confusion and finally, grief.

So, I save Mother’s Day as a time to honor her memory and to remember her. My mom was not a demonstrative woman and I don’t remember her showering any of us four children with affection but I still felt loved. She was a good conversationalist and she’d talk about her dreams beyond being a mom. She also spoke with a certain amount of resignation. It’s as if she knew time wasn’t on her side. You see, when Charlotte was 16 years old she made a promise to herself that she’d buy herself a mink coat on her 50th birthday as a reward just for getting there. She told me that, even as a girl, she was pretty sure she’d never wear that coat. She was right. She passed away 6 months before her 50th birthday.

Now, I’m 6 months away from my 50th birthday. I’m going to outlive my mother. I’ve lived longer without her than with her and sometimes I ache with regret that I couldn’t’ know her as an adult. How I would love to talk to her about marriage and children and faith and the future. I’d love to know what kind of grandparent she would have made. And the questions I wish I could ask her just keep coming. Questions about her youth, my youth, incidents that I only half remember, her recipe for that pumpkin custard pie I loved …

I’m sometimes reminded that I am my mother’s daughter. There are things she used to do that angered me or mortified me and there were characteristics she possessed that would drive me up the wall. Of course those are the very characteristics that I now call my own. But that’s OK. I look forward to carrying my mother with me as I enter a phase of life she never got to experience.